1896. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 81 



opens with the presidential address dehvered to the Biological Section 

 of the British Association in i8go. It is a discussion of the general 

 questions connected with development, in the most interesting style of 

 tlie late Milnes Marshall. The second paper, reprinted from the 

 Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, contains the results 

 obtained by O. H, Latter when, as Berkeley Fellow, he investigated 

 the development of Anodon and Unio. The volume also contains the 

 careful studies of marine Turbellaria made by F. W. Gamble, and 

 contributed to the Quavtevly Journal of Microscopical Science, Dr. Hurst's 

 papers on Arclwopteryx, which appeared in our own pages, and a 

 number of other reprints by various authors. 



Cambrian Fossils in Victoria. 



In our February number we alluded to the discovery of the Cam- 

 brian trilobite, Olenellus, on the boundary between South Australia 

 and Queensland in the far north. Cambrian rocks, as evidenced 

 by fossils, were previously known in the Yorke Peninsula, in other 

 localities within 300 miles of Adelaide, in Tasmania, and also from 

 the Kimberley district of West Australia, although the exact locality 

 of this latter appears to be rather doubtful. The occurrence of rocks 

 of this age in Victoria has hitherto been assumed upon purely strati- 

 graphical grounds. No remains, at all events of such a nature as to 

 prove their age, had been found contained in them. But now, in the 

 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria (vol. viii. pp. 52-64, April, 

 1896), Mr. R. Etheridge, jun., describes a new genus and species of 

 trilobite, which has been obtained from a limited outcrop of shale in 

 the Heathcote district, Victoria, where Cambrian rocks had previously 

 been supposed to exist. The fossils were found in 1894, and the 

 time that has elapsed before publication is due to the care that Mr. 

 Etheridge has obviousl}' taken in determining their identity. The 

 specimens, which consist of cephalic shields and pygidia, are all so 

 decorticated, that their study is somewhat difficult. Mr. C. D. 

 Walcott, to whom drawings were sent, identified one as a fragment 

 of Olenoides quadriceps (Hall and Whitfield) a Middle Cambrian species, 

 and said " The fossils undoubtedly belong to the Middle Cambrian 

 Fauna, as they are not of the type found in the Upper or Lower 

 Cambrian." Mr. Etheridge, however, after a careful examination, 

 regards the fossils as representing a distinct genus and species, which 

 he names Dinesus ida, in allusion to the two supplementary circum- 

 scribed lobes of the glabella, and to INIount Ida, near which the fossils 

 were found. The little brachiopod which occurs with the trilobite is 

 doubtfully referred to Lakhmina, a genus of the Trimerellidae, which 

 has been found in the Cambrian series of the Salt Range in India. 

 Whatever may be the precise zoological position of the fossils recorded, 

 there seems little doubt that they prove the existence of a Cambrian 

 fauna in Victoria. 



